lca2007

I’ve only just got Internet access so here is one long post covering several days. I’ll probably keep doing this as I don’t have Internet at the motel.

Saturday 13th January

Arrived in Sydney today at 10:00am after 24 hours on the train. The trip was okay, got a fair amount of sleep and lots of uninterrupted reading and conversation time. R showed me some php which I want to learn more of so that I can better administer the Teen Challenge website www.tc.asn.au

We all had an afternoon nap in our nice motel room. I didn’t sleep as long as R and K. I decided to go exploring. I walked over to the Uni campus to suss out where the conference will be, found it easily and on the way back found a Coles supermarket. When R and K woke up we all went shopping. Our motel room is a family room with ensuite bathroom and a complete kitchen, this way we can do our own meals 🙂 which is much easier and cheaper for us.

Tomorrow I might go to Maroubra Christian City Church I don’t think it’s far from our motel.

Sunday 14th JanuaryI didn’t go to Maroubra Christian City Church because they’d moved further away from Avoca St. I went to GracePoint Christian Church in Soudan St which is just near where we’re staying.

After lunch I walked to Coogee Beach. I’ve got a number of photos. I couldn’t get over the smallness of the beach. I guess I’m used to Adelaide beaches which go for miles. The other thing I wasn’t used to was the number of people. You could hardly walk on the sand because nearly every area of sand was covered with people. The lawn areas just back from the beach were packed with people too. It’s quite like Glenelg in Adelaide. I also enjoyed looking at the shops along Coogee Bay Rd. more multicultural than Glenelg. Had an icecream on the way back 🙂

R has this quote from Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation) as her email signature: “And above all society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary cooperation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our neighbors in a natural way is “piracy”, they polluteour society’s civic spirit. – RMS”

This is one of the things I love about linux.conf. Everyone talks about the cool things they’re doing and shares the resources they’ve created – teaching notes and materials, ideas etc! 🙂 The more things I learn the more ideas I get.

Tuesday 16th JanuaryChris Blizzard from One Laptop Per Child gave the keynote speech. I’d love to see these laptops available to Australia. We (Teen Challenge) could use them in outback South Australia at Fregon Indigenous community, where we work with the kids who’re petrol sniffing. The other ideas I’d thought of was taking a pile of hardware and teaching them how to build their own pc and install and configure Linux. They take their pc home at the end of the course or that becomes their pc in the classroom. With that ownership of the pcs and the project that would cut down on vandalism to a huge extent. Now that would be cool!